People are requested to complete forms for various reasons. For example, a patient may use a form to provide a doctor with the patient's medical history. As another example, a person may need to complete a form to conduct a money transfer transaction using a money transfer service provider, such as WESTERN UNION. Also, in many instances, a job application may include a standard form that must be filled out with the applicant's biographical information. Of course, many other forms are possible.
The use of forms to collect data may present several problems. First, it may not be possible to accurately determine if the person providing the information on the form is who the person has identified himself to be. One solution may be to have someone else manually verify an identification card (such as a government-issued driver's license) of the person completing the form. However, this may require someone to manually inspect the identification card. Also, a manual inspection of an identification card may result in human error. A person posing as someone else may be a significant problem in a situation where a criminal act is being furthered using the form, such as a transfer of money to fund terrorist activities or complete illegal drug sales.
Another problem possibly created by collecting information using forms is that the information handwritten on the form may need to be transcribed into a computer system to be electronically readable. For example, a doctor may want the medical history provided by a patient to be loaded to a database. If the patient provides his medical history on a form, someone may need to manually transcribe the information into a database using a computer. Such a process may be time consuming and, thus, costly. Such a manual transcription may also result in errors being introduced to the person's medical history.
Further, it may be impractical for a person to personally type his or her information directly into an electronic form via a computer (or any other computerized device, such as an tablet computer, netbook, laptop, smartphone, etc.) with a standard input device, such as a keyboard. For example, a particular form may need to be filled out by dozens of people in a short span of time. Having multiple computers available to allow people to simultaneously complete the form may be impractical.
The invention described herein addresses these and other problems.